Thursday, August 16, 2012

Director Spotlight #9.3: David Cronenberg's Shivers

Every
month, Director Spotlight takes a look at an auteur, shines some light
on a few items in the director’s body of work, points out what makes them an
artist, and shows why some of their films work and some don’t. August’s
director is body horror auteur David Cronenberg.

Grade: 87 (A-)

Stereo and Crimes of the Future showed David
Cronenberg’s talent, but both were radically experimental slogs that suffered
from lack of narrative drive. Neither were particularly satisfactory.
Cronenberg took some time between 1970’s Crimes
of the Future and his theatrical debut, 1975’s Shivers (released in the U.S. as They Came From Within), and it made a huge difference. The film is
Cronenberg’s first proper exploration of the Body Horror subgenre, if not the
first proper Body Horror film altogether; some arguments could be made to
precursors like Invasion of the Body
Snatchers or The Fly (which
Cronenberg would later remake) or pregnancy-horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and It’s Alive. But Shivers is
the first visceral depiction and blueprint of what the subgenre was(Dan O’Bannon took more than a few ideas for
his Alien script), and Cronenberg’s
first great movie.

Something strange is happening over at the Starliner
Apartments in Montreal. Dr. Emil Hobbes (Fred Doerlin) has bred a strange
parasite, ostensibly to be used in transplants. But the doctor has more
sinister plans: believing humanity to have become over-reliant on the mind
rather than the flesh, he develops the parasite to work as “a combination of
aphrodisiac and venereal disease”. After the parasite latches onto the host, it
causes unrestrained sexual behavior, which can then be spread through sexual
contact. Hobbes implants his sexually promiscuous teen-aged mistress with a
parasite, but he panics after he loses control and kills her. But it’s too
late: she’s already begun a chain of events that spreads throughout the
apartment complex.

The greatest influences on Cronenberg’s work are not
filmmakers, but rather writers. Certainly Cronenberg’s chilly reserve resembles
that of Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman, but it seems more connected to the
aloof remove of Cronenberg favorite Vladimir Nabokov. Shivers also shows a more pronounced influence from William S.
Burroughs- the frenetic, horrifying orgies that make up the film wouldn’t be
out of place in Naked Lunch, while
the setting and concept is oddly well-timed in its close proximity to the
release of the 1975 novel High Rise by
J.G. Ballard. It’s no wonder that Cronenberg would go on to adapt works by both
Burroughs and Ballard. The idea of a transformation is less literally physical
here than in later Cronenberg works, but the psychological transformation still
feels of a piece to the work of Franz Kafka.And then there’s the whole philosophy of the film: that sexuality is
natural and should not be repressed by bourgeois values, taken from the studies
of psychologist Wilhelm Reich. Cronenberg takes these diverse influences and
applies it to the structure of a horror film, specifically a Romero zombie
movie, and makes the converting force internal rather than external. This new
genre structure gives Cronenberg a more accessible and effective framework to
filter his obsessions through than his rambling early features did.

Cronenberg was learning how to direct a feature film on the
job while making Shivers, which lends
to the film’s awkward framing during expository scenes and an occasional sense
of hesitancy, but it’s only a hindrance a few times. For the most part, it
shows a director leaps and bounds beyond his beginnings in a remarkably assured
theatrical debut. Cronenberg contrasts the sterile dullness of the Starliner
apartments with the horror lurking underneath early on in a scene which cuts
between the hotel manager showing a group around and Hobbes murdering his mistress, performing a crude autopsy, and
pouring acid into her body before killing himself. It’s a deeply disturbing
sequence that showcases jarring shifts in tone, chaotic and brutal but coldly
matter-of-fact violence, unsettling sexual overtones, and what-the-hell
weirdness, a playful touch that’s absolutely horrifying. Cronenberg also shows
a strong sense of how to build suspense in several long, dragged out silences
where the audience just waits for one of the parasites to jump out. I particularly
love a shot of one character walking down a hall after her husband has been
taken over, her world crumbling around her.

The parasites are rather crude effects, but their crudeness
is part of what makes them so effective. They look disconcertingly like a cross
between a lump of shit and a phallus, which speaks to both their nasty,
infectious quality and their ability to spark powerful sexual change. Cronenberg’s
earliest real depictions of body horror is the stuff of nightmares- from early
signs of retching and bleeding from the mouth to more viscerally affecting
sequences of characters vomiting parasites and parasites causing lumps under
the skin. Horror movies are often a good excuse for young couples to get close,
but it’s hard to imagine anyone making out during Shivers. It’s a film that makes one deeply uncomfortable with their
own body, what with the viral invasion of the body and unhinged sexual
behavior.

But is that a bad thing? The film maintains the neutral
stance that Cronenberg’s earlier features did- there’s no moral lesson to be
learned from this horrorshow, only a biological event. One could argue that the
lack of character development or depth is a flaw, but Cronenberg isn’t playing
with characters here. He’s playing with repressed bourgeois archetypes- plain
vanilla doctor, bonehead yuppie, distressed, uptight housewife. Wilhelm Reich’s
philosophy argued that middle-class sexual mores added to neurosis, and Cronenberg represents that perfectly (he's said that he sympathizes with the characters after they've undergone their change). Everyone in
the Starliner apartments seems uncomfortable with their sexuality and cut off
from one another- husbands and wives don’t sleep together, and the affair
between Paul Hampton’s doctor/ostensible protagonist and his nurse seems awfully
lacking in chemistry. When she strips in front of him, it’s rather nondescript,
and he doesn’t take much of an active interest in her (he is getting some odd
news about the parasite’s origins at the time, though).

Along comes a crazed
doctor with no sexual mores and a liberating parasite that enters the body in
any way it can, be it by bite or though an orifice (any orifice). The film is certainly filled with plenty of rape
imagery- the parasite entering people, newly sexually liberated beings single-mindedly
pursuing new conquests- but the screams often turn to moans from pleasure as
the characters make friends with the disease. There are no more boundaries,
with rigidly defined heterosexuality giving way to an omnisexuality that gives
equal regards to male-female, male-male, female-female, and so on. “Everything
is erotic”, as one character says. It’s deeply disturbing to us- any film that
shows a father-daughter relationship and orgies where age isn’t discriminated
is going to be. But then, liberation is often an ugly process. The film’s
chilling final shot maintains that moral ambiguity- is there a right or wrong
in this situation, and are these formerly repressed people now better off
having had sexual release- exemplifies what makes Shivers so effective as a horror film. It’s deeply disturbing,
sharply satirical, and wholly original.

But don't take my word for it. Shiversis available in its entirety on YouTube.

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